Previous Post: Days of Discovery – Acts 1 and 2
Act 3, in Days of Discovery, covers the actual ocean voyage to find the Land of Danger, and it is where all of the points are scored. The first 2 acts are there to set you up as well as possible for Act 3.
A full Voyage in the game is made up of 5 completed Segments … storywise, each Segment is about a week at sea. It consists of a Segment Difficulty card, and the difficulty number on that card (1, 2 or 3) determines the number of Cost cards that will randomly determine what sort of conditions you were sailing under and how many crew and supplies were lost. All of this information is given along the edge of each card.
While the Segment Difficulty card can either come from your hand or be flipped from the top of the deck, the Cost cards are all added from the top of the deck. So, while you can prepare for the voyage in Act 2 by building your hand to have a wide variety of things, you really won’t know what your voyage actually holds until you are on it.
To complete a Segment, you must discard cards from your hand whose “Market” items will cover those costs shown on the Segment. Some cards actually cancel out the costs associated with certain conditions — Priests cancel Bad Luck, Doctors cancel Illness, Merchants cancel Rough Seas — while most others just provide some combination of crew and supplies. You must pay for all costs on a Segment to complete it, and you are allowed to (and will likely need to) overpay.
Once the Segment is paid, the payment and cost cards are all discarded and the Segment Difficulty card is added to your “voyage tableau” for scoring at the end of the game. The “1” difficulty segments are pretty easy to pay for, but won’t score you many points at the end of the game.
You will also add another card to your voyage tableau — your “Journal” card. This card is played face down from your hand. The value shown in the ship on that card is the quality of the journal you wrote about that segment of the voyage. Because history not only rewards a difficult trip, but also a well written story! 😉 The Journal cards are not revealed until the end of the game.
Sometimes, you are unable to pay the costs on your current segment … so you are forced to “Forage” instead. Foraging adds 3 cards to your hand, but at the cost of adding 1 extra cost card to your segment. To Forage, you flip over the top 4 cards from the deck — pick one to add to the segment, and put the other 3 in your hand. This does use up your turn, so you really only want to Forage when it’s a necessity.
Once a player has completed their 5th Segment, then all other players get one final turn. The Journal cards are revealed and all ship values on each player’s voyage tableau are summed to get a final score. If there is a tie, the rank of the Sponsor you secured in Act 1 is the tie breaker.
Next Article: Days of Discovery – Solo Play
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